I imagine Cate Marvin does everything elegantly. I know this is wrong. Her poetry is violent and wrongly right. It glamorously drapes itself over horse cock and burning buildings, and it does this because she must be so completely inelegant. And she can be revered as utterly perfect for being willing to write about it. To let us in.

Let me in. Being let in. This is something I obsess about. I like to think everyone does and thinking so makes me feel better although liking to does not.

Sometimes you should want people to shut you out, but rarely are we any of us intelligent enough to beg and plead for evil to abandon us. We will get to keep the pain it will inevitably leave behind, hugging the entrails dragging along the ground. Our entrails. Again again again.

Listen to this:
Sorrow found me when I was young. Sorrow waited. Sorrow won.
Matt Berninger tells you what you already don’t want to know/know already.

Or don’t listen. If I know you, that’s probably your mode. If I love you, that’s definitely your mode.

I know I know I know. There are exceptions to these rules. The real ones and the ones I make up. You could be that exception that isn’t actually which I will stumble over! Would you like to be?

I want to be Cate’s Little Poem That Tries! my unsubsidized loan heart my on loan and lonely heart

I want to be Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex who refuse to allow they’d pretend they just happened by on their way to India to buy some cardamom, some nutmeg and spices — like you’d just accidentally happen to decimate Whole Civilizations and Worlds just to set a nice breakfast table

Perhaps I could become George Elliott Clarke’s hollering Go ahead and compose a poem on Love: You’ll poison it with poetry.

Unfortunately, I am not a great poem. I am still me and me and I cannot run away from her, however childishly she behaves. I must learn to do what Cate does: unravel it as if it is some kind of sick gift that I am just sick enough to enjoy.